Landmarks on Titan

Cassini image of Titan with place names. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI. Click to enlarge.
Like an ancient mariner charting the coastline of an unexplored wilderness, Cassini’s repeated encounters with Titan are turning a mysterious world into a more familiar place.

During a Titan flyby on Oct. 28, 2005, the spacecraft’s narrow-angle camera acquired multiple images that were combined to create the mosaic presented here. Provisional names applied to Titan’s features are shown; an unannotated version of the mosaic is also available.

The mosaic is a high resolution close-up of two contrasting regions: dark Shangri-La and bright Xanadu. This view has a resolution of 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) per pixel and is centered at 2.5 degrees north latitude, 145 degrees west longitude, near the feature called Santorini Facula. The mosaic is composed of 10 images obtained on Oct. 28, 2005, each processed to enhance surface detail. It is an orthographic projection, rotated so that north on Titan is up.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.